Jed S. Rakoff writes:  In Too Big to Jail, Brandon Garrett, a highly regarded law professor at the University of Virginia, presents for a lay readership a detailed and comprehensive examination of deferred corporate prosecutions, and corporate criminal prosecutions generally, and concludes that they have been, on the whole, ineffective. According to Garrett, “the big story of the twenty-first century” in corporate prosecutions is that “prosecutors now try to rehabilitate a company by helping it to put systems in place to detect and prevent crime among its employees and, more broadly, to foster a culture of ethics and integrity inside the company.”

But Garrett—on the basis of his own painstaking gathering of evidence (for neither the Department of Justice nor any other governmental entity keeps detailed and complete records of how such agreements are implemented over time)—finds that many, perhaps most such agreements, while often obscuring who was personally responsible for the company’s misconduct, fail to achieve meaningful structural or ethical reform within the company itself (a good example being the Pfizer cases described below). Nonetheless, Garrett does not urge the abandonment of deferred prosecution agreements, or of comparable non-prosecution agreements and corporate guilty plea agreements, but recommends instead that various steps be taken to improve their efficacy, including greater judicial oversight, greater use of court-appointed monitors, and greater attention to breaches of the agreements.   Does Corporate Rehabilitation Work

Has currency manipulation had been raised in the TPP talks?  Although Congress has been pushing the administration to bring up currency provisions in the negotiations for years, doing so would significantly alter, and perhaps torpedo, the deal with Japan.

Of course, currency manipulation is difficult to combat with a domestic law — since unlike trade pacts, domestic laws are not agreements with other nations that include internationally binding enforcement mechanisms. The bill would require the Department of Commerce to include currency manipulation subsidies in its calculations of unfair trade practices prohibited under other trade pacts, making it easier for the U.S. government to win trade cases against other countries, and to secure heftier judgments.

Both Republicans and members of the Obama adminsitration stress that they are seeking a “high-standards” agreement that would counter the power of China to weaken global regulations.   Three of the countries involved in the talks — Malaysia, Brunei and Vietnam — are serial human rights abusers.  They simply do not have the institutional infrastructure in place to enforce strong protections.

Is there a strong intellectual property proivision  included in TPP. Those copyright, patent and other provisions, however, are the subject of hot debate, with many tech experts warning they will crimp the development of new digital applications.

By granting pharmaceutical companies long-term monopolies on prescription drugs, moreover, those policies dramatically inflate the cost of medicine. The Indian government, for instance, recently authorized a generic version of a patented cancer medicine for $157 a month.

Doctors Without Borders, a humanitarian group that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999, points out the human cost of these provisions.

A fast-track bill would not only apply to TPP talks, but also to another pending deal with the European Union and any other future trade pacts covered by the timeframe of the bill. Any EU deal must include a financial services chapter. European negotiators have pressed U.S. regulators to loosen financial regulations for years in other international forums. Meanwhile, Republicans seeking to roll back the 2010 Dodd-Frank bank reform law have crafted bills to help banks dodge U.S. oversight by substituting weaker European rules and overseers.

Froman, Obama’s representative who worked at Citigroup before joining the Obama administration in 2009, pushed back against Hatch on that issue, saying USTR did not support a bank regulatory chapter in the EU deal.

Simon Johnson writes:   America’s presidential election is still nearly two years away, and few candidates have formally thrown their hats into the ring. But both Democrats and Republicans are hard at work figuring out what will appeal to voters in their parties’ respective primary elections – and thinking about what will play well to the electorate as a whole in November 2016.

Stephen S. Roasch writes:  Predictably, the European Central Bank has joined the world’s other major monetary authorities in the greatest experiment in the history of central banking. By now, the pattern is all too familiar.  Central banks take the conventional policy rate down to the dreaded “zero bound.”  They then embrace the unconventional approach of quantitative easing (QE).

Unable to cut the price of credit further, central banks shift their focus to expanding its quantity.  For the ECB and the Bank of Japan (BOJ), both of which are facing formidable downside risks to their economies and aggregate price levels, this is not an idle question. For the United States, where the ultimate consequences of QE remain to be seen, the answer is just as consequential.

J. Bradford DeLong looks at two books on the Great Recession and concludes that we acted incorrectly to solve the problems:

The first book is The Shifts and the Shocks, by the conservative British journalist Martin Wolf, who begins by cataloguing the major shifts that set the stage for the economic disaster that continues to shape the world today. His starting point is the huge rise in wealth among the world’s richest 0.1% and 0.01% and the consequent pressure for people, governments, and companies to take on increasingly unsustainable levels of debt.

The second book: Hall of Mirrors, traces our tepid response to the crisis to the triumph of monetarist economists, the disciples of Milton Friedman, over their Keynesian and Minskyite peers – at least when it comes to interpretations of the causes and consequences of the Great Depression. When the 2008 financial crisis erupted, policymakers tried to apply Friedman’s proposed solutions to the Great Depression. Unfortunately, this turned out to be the wrong thing to do, as the monetarist interpretation of the Great Depression was, to put it bluntly, wrong in significant respects and radically incomplete.    What Caused the Great Recession

Nader writes:  In May of 2014, financial firm Credit Suisse AG pled guilty to serious criminal charges. The giant bank aided and assisted approximately 22,000 wealthy U.S. taxpayers (whose names Credit Suisse AG escaped having to send to the Justice Department for law enforcement) for over a decade in filing false income tax returns and other documents with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

The full extent of these crimes, according to a Department of Justice news release, are as follows: “assisting clients in using sham entities to hide undeclared accounts;” “soliciting IRS forms that falsely stated, under penalties of perjury, that the sham entities were the beneficial owners of the assets in the accounts;” “failing to maintain in the United States records related to the accounts;” “destroying account records sent to the United States for client review;” “using Credit Suisse managers and employees as unregistered investment advisors on undeclared accounts;” “facilitating withdrawals of funds from the undeclared accounts by either providing hand-delivered cash in the United States or using Credit Suisse’s correspondent bank accounts in the United States;” “structuring transfers of funds to evade currency transaction reporting requirements;” and “providing offshore credit and debit cards to repatriate funds in the undeclared accounts.”

These elaborate illegal acts over many years are quite revealing. They show a deliberate willingness by Credit Suisse AG officials to knowingly engage in profitable activities that defrauded the United States Treasury and burdened honest taxpayers.

The Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, or ERISA, was enacted to protect the retirement savings of retirement plan participants. The law, in theory, automatically disqualifies institutions like Credit Suisse AG who have committed serious crimes or pled guilty to serious crimes from serving as a “qualified professional asset manager” (QPAM) of ERISA assets or pension plans.

Unfortunately, the Department of Labor has not adequately enforced this law or its regulations in this area.

The Department of Labor (DOL) already has granted Credit Suisse a temporary waiver to continue conducting their pension management business. On January 15th, the DOL held a public hearing—where I testified— to discuss whether Credit Suisse and its affiliates can continue this troubling trend of avoiding the consequences of their actions indefinitely. Credit Suisse AG is hoping to completely sidestep the mechanisms of justice for their admittedly serious crimes and carry on business as usual—a result that in itself is, unfortunately, business as usual.

This routine ability to evade proper punishment is the root of the issue of so much corporate and Wall Street crime—a slap on the wrist leads to a perpetual cycle of wrongdoing with no end in sight. Their corporate lawyers turn laws into “no-law” laws. Corporate crime pays.

The Department of Labor, which exists to defend workers, now has a unique opportunity to stand proudly at its post and to send a clear message—a firm signal—to other Qualified Professional Asset Managers that if they commit unthinkable criminal violations, they lose the ability to handle pension funds. On the other hand, allowing these institutions to continue to receive permanent waivers would be a clear signal that the DOL will tolerate cutting corners and criminal wrongdoing by powerful financial institutions at the expense of workers, complying taxpayers, democracy, and the rule of law.